First-time novelist Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire is a panoramic pastiche of punk rockers and power brokers, reporters and rich kids, it vaults into the frenetic world of an extraordinary ensemble forever changed in the darkness of the infamous 1977 New York blackout. Hallberg’s criticism, stories, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, and he is also the author of an illustrated novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family.

Claire Vaye Watkins’ “clear-eyed and nimble” (The Boston Globe) debut story collection Battleborn, was named a Best Book of 2012 by a slew of periodicals. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Glimmer Train. A Guggenheim Fellow and an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, she is co-director of the Mojave School, a creative writing workshop for teens in rural Nevada. In Gold Fame Citrus, two young lovers squatting in an abandoned mansion find hope in a drought-wracked future Los Angeles.